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when they were alone Luke talked to him. He told Noel what he was going to have when he was a man. Never what he was going
to be
. Just what he would
have
. A house, he would say, as Noel listened wide-eyed, with a big warm kitchen where you could sit and have as much cake as you liked and big cold glasses of milk, and nice bedrooms upstairs with real big beds, soft—not like the orphanage’s narrow, straw mattresses. And the stairs would have thick white carpets and (Noel liked this best of all) in the garage there’d be a big red automobile, shiny, fast and expensive. At this point Luke would grin and nudge Noel. “Course,” he’d say with a wink, “I’d have a good-looking girl next to me in that fancy car.”
    Noel’s heart would skip a beat. He’d wait every time for Luke to say that of course
he
would be beside him in the front seat of that fancy red car—that it would be the two of them together. Why Luke could possibly want some dumb girl with him was a mystery that worried him in the middle of the night, undermining his new security. Why didn’t Luke want
him?
Why some silly girl! It was unfathomable.
    Noel watched as Luke ran the length of the yard and hurled himself at the topmost bar of the climbing frame,swinging for a moment and then levering himself up until he was parallel with the bar. Murmurs of admiration came from the watching boys as Luke, in perfect control, swung his muscular body over the bar in a deft loop, landing neatly. Dusting his hands on his overalls he ran across the basketball court, flicked the ball from beneath the nose of the waiting boys and tossed it in a perfect arc through the net.
    Noel’s grey eyes widened with admiration. He forgot Luke’s visit to Mrs Grenfell’s office, the mysterious feminine laughter, Luke’s dismissal of his questions and the fact that Luke had not remembered that he’d asked him to wait. Noel felt proud to be Luke’s friend.
    The girls of the Maddox Charity Orphanage were kept apart as much as possible from the boys. Wearing blue print dresses that were droopy and too long in the summer, and harsh dark blue wool that scratched their tender skin in the winter, they learned to read and to write with round uniform letters looped together, and they learned arithmetic so that they might shop and deal with housekeeping money, and they learned American history so that they knew to which flag they were pledging allegiance and why. These activities were secondary to those considered necessary for the life that lay ahead of them as young women. Cooking, homecraft, sewing. Maddox girls were snapped up by domestic agencies as good, reliable girls who with training might make good maids, cooks or housekeepers. Of course they were of neat appearance, always modestly dressed, and Maddox insisted on Sundays off for its girls so that they might attend chapel. The Maddox had its standards.
    For most of the older boys at the orphanage arithmetic and English were made bearable only by the presence of the girls. Breathless glances locked across stained wooden desks, twisted paper notes skittered dangerously along narrowbenches beneath the bewildered myopic gaze of the teacher, and daring assignations were kept behind the chicken huts in the evening. Things went on at the chicken huts that Noel didn’t understand, though he suspected dimly that they were things that would not be considered “Maddox standards”. Sent to collect eggs, he’d stumbled over a couple clasped in a passionate embrace. The girl had turned her face away so that he didn’t see who she was and the boy, fourteen-year-old Matt Brown, had glared at him and told him to shove off. But not before he’d noticed that the girl’s print dress was unbuttoned down to the waist and that Matt’s hands had been inside. It had made Noel feel odd then, sort of fluttery and excited, but he’d dashed off to get the eggs, whistling loudly to cover his sudden nervousness and scattering the hens. He’d